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Caldwell School District Superintendent Shalene French explains how incorporating preschool into elementary school helps prepare students with fundamental skills needed for kindergarten. Darin Oswalddoswald@idahostatesman.com

Caldwell School District Superintendent Shalene French explains how incorporating preschool into elementary school helps prepare students with fundamental skills needed for kindergarten. Darin Oswalddoswald@idahostatesman.com

Why do Idaho, five other states spend nothing on preschool? Political and family culture

In 1864, the tiny town of Idaho City was the biggest American settlement in the state. Now, with the gold rush long over, the logging industry nearly collapsed and few good jobs left in the area, the local K-12 school graduates fewer than 35 students a year.

Nevertheless, since 1999, every 4-year-old in town has been offered an option most in Idaho don’t get: a spot in a free, public preschool program.

“Preschool can be a great resource in rural communities,” said John McFarlane, the district superintendent who doubles as the seventh- through 12th-grade principal. “We can’t go to the museum; we can’t go to the Discovery Center. We don’t have licensed day care. We don’t want to assign (our kids) to a rural life for their whole life if they want something else.”

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Initially, the 352-student district covered the preschool program, as well as a parent education program, with private funding from philanthropists. When that ran out, the district used federal money that comes in lieu of taxes on the national forests that surrounds Idaho City. That money from the Secure Rural Schools Act proved anything but secure, with less money from Congress every year since 2008.

So in 2014, educators asked residents to back the program directly through a local property tax. Voters in this hardscrabble town responded. They approved the measure with a 66 percent majority and renewed it in 2016 with a 67 percent majority. Today the optional preschool program serves 18 students — most of next year’s kindergartners — two or three days a week.

But despite the program’s local popularity, none of the $40,000 it takes to run Idaho City’s preschool comes from the state. And, due to the wording of the Idaho constitution, McFarlane and his team can’t even use any of the district’s state K-12 funding for the 4-year-olds they serve.

Idaho is one of just six states — the others are New Hampshire, South Dakota, Utah, Wyoming and Montana — that offer no funding for preschool. A significant body of research shows that high-quality preschools produce long-term academic and social benefits for children. Nevertheless, resistance to spending on preschool runs deep in Idaho and the other hold-out states, not least because they are home to voters and politicians who strongly believe in family autonomy and minimal government intervention.

Those philosophies bump up hard against the reality that 57 percent of Idaho children under age 6 live with parents who work elsewhere during the day, according to Kids Count, a national survey. Those children have to go somewhere while their parents work.

If we could get someone to come down with a couple of tablets that say, ‘Teach early childhood education,’ that might work.”

Rep. Hy Kloc, on trying to get state preschool money in Idaho

The limited subsidized coverage leaves a lot of working families unable to afford private childcare or preschool, but too well-off to qualify for public assistance. Only 3 percent of Idahoans under age 5 are served by Head Start, the federal early education program for children living in poverty, according to a report by the National Institute of Early Education Research. Another 3 percent receive federally subsidized vouchers for child care through the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services. Parents of the rest of the kids — still more than half the state’s young children — must find other options. Yet, addressing that reality with government programs is anathema to the fiercely independent and often socially conservative lawmakers of the Mountain West.

“I’m afraid the message of some pre-K programs is, ‘Parents, we don’t need you,’ ” said state Sen. Steven Thayn, R-Emmett, vice chairman of the Senate Education committee. “That’s been my concern about pre-K, that parents would let that responsibility slip to the state.”

It is Thayn’s conviction that families are “the most efficient social service delivery system ever devised.” And he thinks the only way for a government intervention to succeed is to work directly with families.

57 Percentage of Idaho children under age 6 with all available parents working

Despite his strong beliefs, Thayn isn’t a hardliner. Forty-nine percent of Idaho’s kindergartners show up not ready to learn to read, according to the results of the state’s reading indicator evaluation. And that bothers Thayn enough that he’s become convinced it’s time for the state to play a role in getting young children kindergarten-ready. He is working with Democrats and advocates to draft a bill that provides $5 million in funding for early education while respecting the role of parents.

Thayn’s recognition that most parents can no longer afford to stay home with their young children is in keeping with a national trend among conservative policymakers, said Katharine Stevens, a resident scholar with a focus on early education at the American Enterprise Institute, a conservative think tank. “We want to make sure their kids’ early development is not jeopardized even as the parents are doing the right thing by working hard for those kids,” Stevens said.

Thayn said his draft bill would provide online educational materials to stay-at-home parents, create homeschool cooperatives and award stipends to parents who get their children academically prepared to start kindergarten. Were the bill to become law, it would also provide matching funds for communities that want to offer shared-cost preschools similar to those offered by Mississippi.

6 Approximate percentage of Idaho children under age 5 served by public early education programs

“In Idaho, generally, we like choices,” Thayn said.

The proposal, which already has several prospective co-sponsors, will likely not get a formal hearing this year, though the state senate and house education committees did listen to presentations on the idea. The next step is just to start “showing it around” to other lawmakers, Thayn said.

Given that there have been at least five attempts to pass a bill funding early education in Idaho since 1999, advocates here aren’t holding their breath for a sudden change.

“If we could get someone to come down with a couple of tablets that say, ‘Teach early childhood education,’ that might work,” joked state Rep. Hy Kloc, D-Boise, who has sponsored much of the preschool legislation to be proposed to the state legislature since 2013. And even though he’s shared those bills’ sponsorships with Republicans, none have passed.

In several Idaho communities, educators have given up waiting for the state and are finding ways to fill the void on their own.

A popular parent-education program in Sandpoint was the brainchild of Dick Cvitanich, the former superintendent, said Marcia Wilson, the executive director of the Panhandle Alliance for Education. In Pocatello, the United Way is working with the schools and the local division of Monsanto, the agriculture giant, to provide a free summer preschool program for some students, among other initiatives, said Kim Hirning, director of early learning for the United Way of Southeastern Idaho.

In Caldwell, the goal is to get all local 4-year-olds into some form of public preschool. The city’s first step toward this goal was to get all of the preschool programs and dollars under the same roof, literally.

The Caldwell district has long run four preschool classrooms for 3- and 4-year-olds with developmental delays, as they are required to do by federal law. The Caldwell YMCA’s heavily subsidized (with privately raised dollars) preschool program also operates out of the district elementary schools. And in January, the local Head Start moved three of its classes into the schools too. All told, the consolidated efforts provide part-time preschool spots to 150 kids, about a third of the district’s incoming kindergarten class of 500.

Next year’s goal is to start using a consistent, high-quality preschool curriculum across all three programs and to ensure that the children attend preschool in the same building in which they will attend kindergarten, said Julie Mead, director of special services for the Caldwell School District.

“The benefit for us, from a logistical standpoint, is creating the opportunity to have kindergartners ready for school,” Mead said. “Around the country, kids are coming into school much better prepared than around here.”

Specifically, the Idaho state reading indicator shows that half of kindergartners show up not knowing the alphabet, not knowing many alphabet sounds and not knowing how to make a rhyme. In some cases, teachers report that students don’t even know which way a book opens or how to turn the pages.

Steven Barnett, executive director of the National Institute for Early Education Research, said such skills are actually far too low a bar for measuring school readiness. What’s harder to evaluate are questions of whether or not a child has some amount of emotional self-control, some social skills for interacting with peers and a basic idea of what might be expected of them in a classroom, he said.

And “the real problem is that a kid who doesn’t know letters probably doesn’t know that many words,” Barnett added. Vocabulary size, unlike an ability to recite the ABCs, has been proven to be a strong predictor of later school success.

There are two ways researchers have found for a child to obtain a large enough vocabulary to ensure some level of academic success: The first is to be born into a family of people willing and able to talk, read, sing and play with them. The second is to attend a high-quality preschool.

Back in Idaho City, it’s free-play time in the portable classroom that serves as the district’s preschool.

Catalina Larrocoechea, 4, sits on a little yellow couch flipping through “The Three Snow Bears” by Jan Brett, which features an Alaskan Native Goldilocks tasting soup, trying on fur-lined winter boots and inadvisably falling asleep in a “just-right” bed in the bears’ igloo. Catalina knows the story and narrates it in her own words as she flips the pages.

Nicholuas Bartholomew, 5, stacks pink blocks, each one smaller than the last, into a towering pyramid. At a table near the center of the room, Matthew Benafield, 4, carefully puts together a puzzle, kitten eye by kitten paw. Each piece is numbered on the back and corresponds with a number in the wooden puzzle frame. Matthew points this out, a keen observation for a child so young. In the back of the room, Taigon LaMantia, 4, and Aralyn Balafas, 5, make a Playdough birthday cake for their friend Bristol Hileman, 4.

“She’s my best friend,” Aralyn said.

“She’s my best friend too!” Taigon added.

Hearing the birthday cake story, Bristol’s mother, Ashley Hileman, laughed: It wasn’t her daughter’s birthday. But Hileman was happy to learn about the budding friendships. She works at the Boise County Courthouse and loves the preschool program for its educational benefits, especially in math, and for the child care it provides.

“I think every school should have to do preschool,” Hileman said. “I know the funding is hard, but I would love it if it was five days a week.”

Like Idaho, political stalemates keep the other hold-out states from doing more with state assistance for preschool.

“All state programs are being cut and there’s no traction for adding anything for early education,” wrote Kari Eakins, spokesperson for the Wyoming Department of Education, by email. Education department spokespersons in South Dakota and New Hampshire also confirmed that there are no high-level talks of creating state preschool programs in their states.

There has been slightly more movement in Utah and Montana. Utah offers an online-only program meant to provide stay-at-home parents with educational materials for preschool-age children. Montana, whose governor is very pro-preschool, won a federal Preschool Development Grant in 2014, planning to use the funds to “improve access to high quality preschool education in 16 high-needs communities,” according to the Montana Office of Public Instruction. But neither state has a direct preschool funding stream.

The majority of state preschool programs that do exist are small, serving less than one-third of resident 4-year-olds nationally. Of the 44 states (and the District of Columbia) that do spend money on early childhood education, only four — Oklahoma, Vermont, West Virginia and D.C. — offer high-quality programs that could provide a spot for every child, regardless of family income. Thus, the problem of finding quality, affordable preschool options is not unique to working families in Idaho or the other hold-out states. But it is a bigger problem when there is no state aid to defray the costs for those families.

The Mississippi Model

Mississippi isn’t usually known for its prowess in delivering public education, but the team that put together the state’s small, high-quality preschool program set their sights high.

“They wanted to create a turnaround in that state,” said Jim Squires, a senior research fellow at the National Institute for Early Education Research who focuses on the southeast and northeast. “They said early on that their goal was to have people flying into Mississippi to see how it can be done.”

Recently, they succeeded. Officials from Idaho visited Mississippi to learn about its collaborative model, which provides matching state funds to communities hoping to provide a public preschool option. Right now, 14 Mississippi communities are offering preschool. Getting state funding is a competitive process and requires proof that communities will match state funds evenly. Unless the community over-matches, the total spent per child for full-day preschool in Mississippi is intended to be $4,300. That’s about half what is spent on the average Head Start 4-year-old.

“One of the arguments we had for years and years in Mississippi was: ‘We shouldn’t have state-funded pre-K because students should be home with their mothers,’ ” said Rachel Canter, executive director of Mississippi First, an education policy nonprofit that helped craft the 2013 legislation that created the program. Finally, advocates did a survey to determine how many children were actually staying home with their mothers. Their findings were the same as they would be in most of the country — that most kids live with parents who work outside the home.

“The overwhelming majority of (children) are somewhere else during the day,” Canter said. “If that is the case, should they not be getting a quality early childhood experience?”

The Secure Rural Schools Act

Intended as a boon for areas with expansive tracts of nontaxable, federally owned land, the Secure Rural Schools and Community Self-Determination Act of 2000 is a multi-million dollar source of funding for much of the rural Mountain West.

While the decreased funding affects whole states, its impact is unevenly distributed, and small rural towns that have no local tax structure suffer the brunt of the losses. One town in Oregon even ran out of money to pay its local police force, and others have struggled to afford to keep even violent felons locked up.

The ongoing tug-of-war between these communities and the federal government that owns the land surrounding them blew up last year when several ranchers from Nevada made national headlines with their armed takeover of a federally run nature preserve in Burns, Ore. Making the situation even more complex, much of the land in dispute is the ancestral homeland of a variety of American Indian tribes.

Meanwhile, the ongoing game of “Whose Land Is it Anyway?” isn’t helping school kids in states that need to find alternate, supplemental, state-generated funding streams.